As Canadians played spectators to the U.S. election circus, two of Canada’s most celebrated indigenous writers gave their thoughts on what the future holds during the Indigenous Innovation Summit at Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre.

Playwright Tomson Highway answered some questions on Nov. 8, the day of the US election, and novelist Joseph Boyden did the same the day after the results were announced. Their answers are intertwined below.

Postmedia: How important is innovation for the future of both our native and non-native populations?

Tomson Highway: Otherwise we won’t survive. But then you can say that about anybody. If the Italians wouldn’t have been innovative, they wouldn’t have survived.

PM: You speak many languages, is that necessary for the survival you refer to?

TH: It’s not necessarily necessary but I think it’s advisable. Uniligualism gives you a uni-dimensional … thinking. And that’s not good. You speak only one language it’s like living in a house with only one window. You need to live in a house that has windows on all four sides to develop a 360-degree circumference perspective on life. That’s what multilingualism does for you, you see things that you wouldn’t see any other way.

PM: How are we doing as far as reconciliation goes?

Joseph Boyden: Reconciliation in Canada, it’s something that I’ve watched; it’s happening, it’s beginning to happen. It’s going to be a long time. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be a rough voyage at times, there’s no question. But I think we’ve begun on a path and Canadians, what I keep seeing over and over crossing the country is that Canadians want reconciliation. At first, it’s a difficult word to try to define because it’s a big word and it’s kind of a frightening word. But reconciliation is, in Edmonton, recognizing the treaty territory. It is schools in Edmonton recognizing these are the original peoples’ traditional lands that we’re standing upon that we’re learning upon. It’s protecting our waterways, the beautiful rivers that run through this area. It’s a very concrete thing. Reconciliation is all of us saying, ‘We’ve made mistakes in the past and we’ve hurt some people very badly in the past and it’s time now to move forward together rather than divided.’

PM: Do we have to leave anything behind, culturally, in order to move ahead?

TH: I think so. I think that’s always the case. You always have to keep tilling the soil, otherwise the vegetation rots or doesn’t grow at all. It’s also necessary to fertilize a garden with manure. For me, emotional trauma works on the same principle. Emotional and psychological trauma works on the same principle as manure. The stinkier the manure, the more spectacular the vegetation becomes.

JB: I don’t really want to get rid of things so much as examine things from the past, examine stories, examine real people. For example, Francis Pegahmagabow, the great World War One sniper who inspired Three Day Road, my first novel, he was a real person of the past and would I want to get rid of him? There’s no way. What I want to do is allow what he did to breathe new life. I’m a true believer that history and the present and the future, there’s a thin line between all of them. History rides on my shoulder with me every day. My father’s exploits in World War Two and my mother as a teacher 40-50 years ago. They all teach me how I should go through my present world and where I should go in the future and so I don’t know if it’s so much for me getting rid of things as it is utilizing them to create new structures. You can’t go back home again is a famous saying and I don’t think that’s something I want to do either, necessarily, but the home I want to create now, so much of the work of that home and the building materials of that home are things from my past that will carry me and my family into the future.

PM: What do you feel about the future?

JB: I got on a plane in New Orleans yesterday to travel to Edmonton, left New Orleans having voted as an American for the first time because I got my passport last year so I’m a dual citizen now. I got off the plane in Edmonton to what no one, I think, many people couldn’t imagine, about half the country. America is a very divided country and I think that’s something that I think is very obvious right now. And I don’t see, going back to the original question of reconciliation, I don’t see us being divided like America is. I see us wanting change and wanting to understand our past and our present in order to move into the future. It’s fascinating, we’re very different places.

PM: Do you feel positive about it?

JB: I feel positive about Canada. It’s very difficult to say right now if I’m feeling very positive about America. And it’s not even a left-right thing. It’s that I don’t like the man (Trump). He’s willing to say what he says and he’s willing to be little and I don’t like little people and I don’t want a little person being the president of the most powerful country in the world. So it’s beyond politics at that point, it gets quite personal in a strange way.

PM: What’s the future for Canada and it’s people, then?

TH: We have bright future ahead of us. I completely and utterly believe that.

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